openSUSE:Osc11 Packaging Guidelines BoF
Those are the notes of the Packaging Guidelines BoF that was held during the openSUSE Conference 2011.
Sascha also uploaded his slides describing what is a good package, which contains useful tips for everyone interested in packaging.
Our packaging guidelines documentation
- lots of discussion about the effort that was started a while ago to merge with Fedora
- rough agreement that we should try to push the parts we both agree on (ie, most of the documentation) upstream, at rpm.org
- needs to be discussed with Fedora
Having a smaller set of groups
- possibly use the same set as Fedora
- improve spec-cleaner to do the automatic replacement
- need to drop the groups view in the yast software installer
Patch tags
- long discussion about the merits of tags in the .spec file and inline description inside each patch
- Recommendation (not enforced): use patch tags in .spec file as it makes things easier to review, and it's easier to jump in a package. However, in the end, it's up to the maintainer to choose the way he prefers
- Rule: choose at least one of tags in .spec file or inline description, so that patches are described.
- Rule that should be enforced: whatever patch guideline is used by a package, it should be applied consistently. This means: if you update a package using one approach, please use the same approach.
- we have a whitelist of packages that don't have to move to SLPP. That's blocking the enforcement of SLPP.
- robjo will update the whitelist so that it tracks a list of packages/versions, instead of a list of packages; that means when a new version of a whitelisted package arrives, SLPP should be applied.
- Reminder that it's wrong to obsolete an old version of the library: libfoo2 should not obsolete libfoo1.